2,770 research outputs found
Reconfiguring the national canon: The Edinburgh edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield
No full textThis paper looks at how the new two volume edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, helps us to reassess the creativity of Katherine Mansfield. Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson’s essay on the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield makes clear how in recent years Mansfield has been ‘brought home’ to New Zealand by way of establishing her reputation as a writer of world significance. Those mid twentieth-century years of cultural nationalism, when Frank Sargeson could write that ‘Mansfield imposed this feminine thing on New Zealand’, and Allen Curnow in the Introduction to his milestone Penguin Book of New Zealand Verse could suggest that Mansfield has ‘something like shame for her country’, have long gone. Mansfield has been (re)instated as the country’s foremost writer; her proto-feminism is seen as one of her many qualities, and her in-between location as both a New Zealand writer and an Anglo-European modernist as a defining strength. Mansfield was a diasporic writer; so too for a number of years was Janet Frame. Both Mansfield and Frame are the most innovative and experimental writers New Zealand has produced. And both, of course, were women. The relation between these elements common to both writers, and their significance for New Zealand literary history, is something that still remains to be fully explored
Introduction: Realigning the margins: Asian Australian writing
No full textEngaging with Asian Australian writing, this book focuses on an influential area of cultural production defined by its ethnic diversity and stylistic innovativeness. In addressing the demanding new transnational and transcultural critical frameworks of such syncretic writing, the contributors collectively examine how the varied and diverse body of Asian Australian literary work intervenes into contemporary representational politics and culture. The book questions, for instance, the ideology of Australian multiculturalism; the core/periphery hierarchy; the perpetuation of Orientalist attitudes and stereotypes; and white Australian claims to belong as seen in its myths of cultural authenticity and authority. Ranging in critical analyses from the historic first Chinese-Australian novel to contemporary award winning Sri Lankan, Bangladeshi and Filipino Australian novels, the book provides an inside view of the ways in which Asian Australian literary work is reshaping Australian mainstream literature, politics and culture, and in the wider context, the world literary scene. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing
Postcolonial thresholds: gateways and borders
No full textIntroduction to a special issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing coedited by Janet Wilson and Daria Tunc
Discoursing on Slums: Representing the Cosmopolitan Subaltern
No full textRepresenting the Cosmopolitan Subaltern” identifies the precarious condition of slum dwellers in the interstices of neoliberal market forces, state indifference and subaltern cosmopolitanism(s) within which their subject identities are formed, negotiated and represented. Wilson argues that reconstructions of urban subalternity found in fiction and film are indebted to the methods and discourses of oral history, case study and interview used in anthropological and sociological research on slums. Focusing on the fictionalised accounts of Mumbai’s slum dwellers in Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire (2010) and Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012), she identifies the ambiguous positioning of such “slum narratives” in accommodating space for individual agency that defers to the normative conception of rights in the West, while paying little attention to the collective claims for communal belonging, rights and ownership made by the political community
(Not) being at home: Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon (2005) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2012)
No full textThis article examines some interventions of Asian Australian writing into the debate over multiculturalism, and the shift from negative stereotyping of Asian migrants, to reification of racial divisions and propagation of a masked racism, to the creation of new alignments and the revival of pre-existing affiliations by migrant and secondgeneration subjects. It compares the practices of not-at-homeness by Asian migrants and their descendants and white Australians in Hsu Ming Teo’s Behind the Moon with those of a Sri Lankan refugee and a white Australian traveller in Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel.
The changing concepts of belonging in the novels show a realignment of core and periphery relations within the nation state under the pressures of multiculturalism and globalization: where home is and how it is configured are questions as important for white Australians whose sense of territory is challenged as they are for Asian migrants who seek to establish a new belonging
Introduction: Janet Frame: ten years on
No full textAn introduction to a special focus in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing of three articles on the works of Janet Frame, to mark the tenth year of her death in 2004. The introduction and editing of the articles were both undertaken by myself
Editors' note
No full text'Editor's note' with Janet Wilson introducing issue 49:1 of the 'Journal of Postcolonial Writing
"Kew Gardens" and "Miss Brill" : Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as short story writers
No full textThis chapter considers the literary relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, whose complex friendship between 1916 and 1920 is well documented. It suggests possible lines of influence between them, discernible in their experimentation with the short story genre during a formative period for both writers: when Woolf was writing short stories and before she had established her reputation as a novelist, and when Mansfield was approaching the mature style that would make her name as a short story writer par excellence. It will draw a comparison between two stories—Woolf’s “Kew Gardens” (1917), and Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” (1920)—both set in public gardens. As responses to similar settings that exhibit differences of modernist technique and approach the stories can also be read in relation to each other through the lens of Mansfield’s and Woolf’s inconstant friendship and literary rivalry
New Zealand Women Traveller Writers : from exile to diaspora
No full textThe focus of this article is a group of New Zealand women traveller writers of the first half of the twentieth century who left their country of origin, and in the encounter with new worlds overseas, reconstructed themselves as deterritorialised, diasporic subjects with new understandings of home and belonging. Their work can be read as both transitional and transnational, reflecting the ambivalence of multiple cultural affiliations and reinflecting literary conventions. Such encounters and new points of reference from transiting through foreign lands inevitably catalyse new and unusual forms of diasporic writing, notable for a heightened consciousness of difference (Kalra et al 2008: 30). This article aims to identify patterns of similarity and contrast in their work, and to determine how they incorporate their varied experiences of loss and liberation into artistic reconciliations with the homeland
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